2 Ways To Get More Twitter Followers

Social media is an excellent resource for every type of business—brick and mortar, online, or both. Twitter is one of the biggest social media networks out there, which means you’re missing out if you aren’t maximizing your tweeting potential. Here’s how to get more Twitter followers for your business, both the easy way and the hard way.

1. The Easy Way – Buying Your Followers

Social media can feel like a popularity contest—people judge the importance and prestige of their peers based on a single number: how many followers. The more followers you have, the easier it is to accrue even more followers. But how do you get people interested in the first place, when you’re just starting out? One shortcut that’s been gaining momentum recently is the practice of buying Twitter followers. If you want to buy some fake followers to raise your profile, all you need to do is visit one of the many third-party websites offering the service, enter your credit card number and Twitter handle, and you could gain thousands of “fans” over the course of a couple days. Prices vary, though it tends to be relatively inexpensive: some sites offer 1,000 followers for only $5. Though the practice is technically against Twitter’s terms of service, it’s incredibly widespread; high percentages of even the most famous tweeters’ followers are fake.

If you’re a business looking to help build up buzz around your company, buying Twitter followers is the easy way to get people interested in your account.

2. The Hard (But Necessary) Way – Creating Quality Content

Whether or not you decide to buy fake followers to fluff up your Twitter standing, you need real followers to be interested in what you have to offer. In order to build up your Twitter fan base in a meaningful way, you absolutely must produce content worth reading. According to Derek Halpern on DIY Themes, several professors from various prestigious institutions recently did a study on what exactly the average Twitter follower considers to be valuable content. What they found was that followers do not appreciate irrelevant, vague, boring, context-free commentary and/or links. Before posting a Tweet, stop and ask yourself if it could be considered any of these things; if so, figure out a better way to frame it.

The tweets considered worth reading were usually deemed funny, useful, informative, or exciting. What does this mean for you? Test out different styles and approaches, and find out which avenues get you the best responses and re-tweets. Humor has the potential to be very effective, but is also risky—comedy is subjective, and it’s easy to fall flat. Another route is to seek out news that relates to your business (even in an oblique way) and post it with an intriguing hook to get people clicking. On the useful front, you can offer Twitter followers specials and deals for your business, and keep them posted on new products and services. Even mundane things like a new look for your website or a shopping cart software upgrade can become interesting if given the right spin.

Social media has the power to help your business grow—you just have to know how to harness its power!

Martha Ryan lives and writes on ecommerce topics of all varieties from her hometown of San Francisco, CA.